“We are fast approaching a crisis point where the failures of the present hyper-corporate, relatively unregulated model of the internet are having severe, detrimental impacts on public communication. We are at a proverbial fork in the road. One route leads an ever deeper downward spiral into digital dystopia: hyper-surveillance, predictive technology working hand in hand with authoritarianism, disinformation overload and proliferating online divisiveness and hatred. The alternative route is a more-regulated internet where accountability matters, guided by a commonly assented ethics of public culture. “Is this alternative possible in an era of winner-takes-all partisanship and corporate greed so vast that it is literally interplanetary in its ambitions? I fear not, but if we are to be civic optimists then it is the only possible hope, and we have no alternative but to say ‘yes’ to a better digital future and to become digital activists who collectively work to make it happen.”
9 Matching Annotations
- Sep 2025
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www.elon.edu www.elon.edu
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- Feb 2023
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It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.
Is the inability to parse satire related to the inability to understand something is a dystopia? I suppose dystopian fictions are simply satire at the core 🤷♀️
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- Dec 2021
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tracydurnell.com tracydurnell.com
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Why is dystopian sci-fi seem more ubiquitous than optomistic sci-fi?
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- Feb 2021
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This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems
there's a solid enough conceptual idea here, that society ought be able to voice some sense, direct & govern the platforms forward & along & upwards. there is something lacking, certainly, in that the companies have nothing to listen to, are so alone. (oh yes there are voices but it's a chaos of voices, there's no scheme for guiding oneself through, so the entity must keep picking for itself what to do.)
still though,
It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant.
no. it sounds a lot dystopian. very very dystopian.
society could use means to weave together coherence, to establish a democratic growth, proclaim the unity it does have. celebrates, accepts & socializes core things to itself.
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- Oct 2020
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icla2020b.jonreeve.com icla2020b.jonreeve.com
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Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought
This is the second time her impression of the workers has made me really laugh. This story so far feels like it takes place in some strange utopia, I guess Laura and her family are very rich, but it seems much stranger than just that--the rose bushes are visited by "archangels", Jose is a "butterfly". and 'workers' are practically alien. Laura seems as taken with the beauty around her as if she is seeing it only for the first few times. This story has a very dreamy feel, maybe even a dystopian quality.
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- Mar 2018
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motherboard.vice.com motherboard.vice.com
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There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia
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- Oct 2017
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
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- Jul 2016
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motherboard.vice.com motherboard.vice.com
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The arrival of quantified self means that it's no longer just what you type that is being weighed and measured, but how you slept last night, and with whom.
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- Jan 2015
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newleftreview.org newleftreview.org
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On the one hand, we can foresee these companies extending their reach ever further into everyday life, to a point where it would become difficult to even articulate why you would want a different model, since our use of these technologies and the politics embedded in them also permits or restricts our ways of thinking about how to live.
The indoctrinated future - probably closer than we think.
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